What’s In A Name?

With 1.4.3 Mythic has announced that it will be offering paid name changes. While this is something that many players have been asking for quite some time, I’m not completely satisfied with the offer. The main reason? Well all the remaining servers have been around since launch. That is over two years of players, making characters and abandoning them. How many people have unsubbed and never returned? How many trial accounts were made only to disappear? How many alts never made it out of tier 1?

Like many players, I have a fair share of 500 alts, give or take 495. Making a creative ‘quasi-lore-appropriate’ name isn’t easy, and the random-name generator comes up with absolute crap – it really just takes several syllables of a possible name and slaps them together leaving you with names 16 characters long. As someone who has been lucky enough to stay on their home server since starting WAR, I have nabbed most of the names I wanted. But for the hordes of people who transferred servers and found that their name was taking by a level 8 who hadn’t logged in since October of 2008, tough luck. The result is that people out of frustration create names which are… well to be blunt, stupid. I don’t role-play at all, but part of me feels like the name should be at least somewhat plausible. Seeing names like a string of w’s or everyday objects like ‘Toiletplunger’ don’t strike me as WAR appropriate names. Are the people to blame? No, the name their toon started with was taken by a trial account that was abandoned no doubt.

So whats to be done with this issue? Well plain and simple – Mythic should transfer all accounts from players who haven’t played in over 6 months to a orphanage server. Naturally should they return, they can choose to find a new home and a new name, but until then the names of all their toons will be freed up. All you have to do is roll a new toon in tier 1 to see how frustrated players are with their names. Come on Mythic, its time you freed up the name-database. The poor souls out there are having increasingly more difficulty finding a new way to spell Legolas.

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Well..resistance to frustration is no big stat in todays player’s life…

I’ve always been able to find a name that I like. There was only one exception, but this got handled by customer support from Mythic, which they won’t do now because of the paid name changes. As it was server transfer related they could change my name back to my old name, which I had before the transfer. .

Even if the random name generator spits out a way too long name..it gives something to work with. I think that the random name generator from WAR is one of the better ones. Even if you don’t like the name from the generator..you can shorten it, take just a bit out of the name, add a vowel here or there…. or if this all doesn’t help, just take a list of names in the internet (some nordish, russian names for chaos..german ones for Order..etc..). In Warhammer it’s quiet easy as it’s at least for order and chaos more or less just common names (I don’t count elves as order 😛 ).

The problem is imo not only in the hordes of players who block names and are inactive..it’s also that the people don’t want to invest ..5-10 minutes of their time for a char they are maybe gonna play for a couple of months.

Hm, when I was transfering my chars from KEP to KN there was an announcement form Mythic that if there are any naming conflicts between your high rank characters (rank 30-40) and inactive low rank characters on the server (everything up to rank 20) you should submit a ticket and a CSR would rename the inactive character to something else and give your character that name. 3 out of my 5 rank 40 chars’ names were already taken on KN, but I got all of them back thanks to the nice CSRs (and a bit of perseverance).

I’m no sure they’ll still do this, but it’s worth a shot? Even if you can pay for the name change it doesn’t help much if your name is already taken, so it would make sense if Mythic still renamed inactive lowbie characters.

The other trick for a free rename when transfering your character from server to server is to create a level 1 character on the new server with your name (if there isn’t one), which will create a naming conflict and allow you to rename your original character.